With the growing number of packages and more and more complex dependencies between them, the work for the release managers must increase, while the work the release managers can put into it can't be scaled accordingly. So how can we take load off the release managers? Perhaps some of the work they do can be avoided altogether?

Note: I am no release manager and this are just ideas, perhaps a release manager or someone else who knows this stuff could comment on it

The release team is aware of this problem and is dealing with it by growing the team. At some point that will stop working, when the team gets too big.

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I think that part of the problem is that we're leaning on the release team to make hard decisions that we should be capable of making ourselves. -- JoeyHess

Please explain what kind of decisions you have in mind -- robert

Read debian-release, you'll frequently see developers:

Say: "can this <random change> get into sarge?"

Trying to get in a change without thinking it through.

It's also annoyingly common for maintainers to upload a fix that really needs to get into sarge with other nonessential changes that increase the probability a bug will be introduced

Upload something such as a security fix with a priority that's too low

Package a new upstream version of a library in a way that it holds lots of other things out of sarge.

All of these are responsible for a lot of the load on the release team. All can be avoided by maintainers thinking through the conseqences. -- JoeyHess